Pedro Machado is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Dhar India Studies Program, Indiana University. He is a global and Indian Ocean historian with interests in commodity histories, labor and migratory movements, and the social, cultural, environmental and commercial trajectories of objects. He is the author of several works, among which are Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Pearls, People and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2020). He is currently at work on a global history of pearling and shell collection and exchange while also developing research on eucalyptus and colonial forestry in the Portuguese empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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This Sawyer Seminar is funded by the Mellon Foundation.